Rosencrantz and Guildenstern centers on the misadventures and musings of two minor characters—childhood friends of Prince Hamlet. The duo appears on stage in this play when they are offstage in Hamlet. Focusing on free will vs. determinism, the search for value and the impossibility of certainty, the play has a love for cleverness and language, treating it as a confounding system fraught with ambiguity to engage and delight the audience.